Chris Selley: Google Transit is going places

It’s always weird to hear someone gush about the TTC — especially in a room full of journalists, who can be a tad negative at the best of times, and these are not the TTC’s best of times.

Nevertheless, there was Google’s cheery Jessica Wei on Tuesday morning telling reporters what a super-terrific time she’d had travelling from the airport to Google’s Toronto headquarters at Yonge and Dundas, by bus and two subways, and fresh off a red eye to boot. It was so cheap, fast and clean! And with the help of Google Transit, which you can now use to plan your TTC journeys, so easy! Enter your start point and your end point — just about anywhere in the GTA — and do what the computer tells you. It couldn’t be simpler.

Interestingly, Ms. Wei’s account of her morning revealed that Google Transit had instructed her to alight her southbound Yonge train at College and walk south to Dundas. Mayor David Miller suggested the system knew what a beautiful day it was and wanted her to get some fresh air … which doesn’t explain why Google Transit suggested I alight my southbound Yonge train at Queen and walk north to Dundas. “I wouldn’t say it isn’t accurate,” Ms. Wei wonderfully observed. “I’d say it’s not optimized.”

If she didn’t work for Google, I might have been worried. But we all know the bugs will be fixed, and we all know Google Transit is pretty fantastic. Aside from the costs associated with gathering and maintaining the necessary data, it’s free both to the participating cities and the end users. It seamlessly links together any adjacent transit systems that also use the system — Ms. Wei planned an implausible but apparently possible 97-minute trip from Yonge and Dundas to the McMichael Gallery; GO Transit is on board. If the TTC could ever run to a schedule, we’d have a bloody triumph on our hands.

A massive amount of the frustration associated with using the TTC would melt away if people simply knew when the next bus, streetcar or subway was coming, and could rejigger their planned journeys accordingly. And real-time next-vehicle-arrival technology, currently being rolled out, should do the trick.

In short, I struggle to think of a negative thing to say about Tuesday’s announcement other than that it should have happened years ago and that the TTC’s in-house trip planner, launched early this year, is now pretty much obsolete. (Outgoing TTC chairman Adam Giambrone kept insisting the two are “complementary,” but the only concrete things he could come up with that the TTC planner does and Google doesn’t are identify wheelchair-accessible routes and specify a preference for streetcars, buses or subways.)

It’s tempting to see the duplicate trip planner as a symptom of the same disease that creates this bizarre skepticism of the Presto fare card. In some people’s minds, it’s like Toronto and the TTC are somehow special: Brampton, Mississauga and GO just wouldn’t understand. But the TTC’s embrace of open data is a move away from that. Not just schedules, but real-time information about vehicle locations is now available for download in raw form from the TTC’s website. Not that we should feel especially grateful for it — we pay for this system; it’s our data — but this instinct is both laudable and surprising. It means Toronto’s fantastic community of transit enthusiasts, who created a fully functional trip planner — MyTTC — long before the TTC did, now have every opportunity to fill any gaps Google leaves open.

Still, even if you think the TTC’s in-house trip planner was a total waste of time, it seems to have cost no more than a couple of million bucks — not bad for this city. In a few months, with Google’s bugs ironed out and a new mayor in Mr. Miller’s office, maybe it’ll be a good time to shut it down and pocket the savings, however meagre. But the most important thing here is that we’re finally seeing some progress on some of the TTC’s most glaring deficiencies. After the press conference, even as I prowled around in search of a surprisingly elusive bank machine where I could get some cash to buy tokens from a human being, I was filled with hope that I might not have to do it much longer.